A younger you—a ballsy, brash, fourteen-year-old you—would tell the past where to shove it. But the past would not listen.
The past is not your friend. It slips under your door at night, bent on destroying the life that you have made for yourself here. A life not readily packed up in a rucksack. A life with clutter. A life built on a foundation of sand. But your life all the same.
You have put down roots. Dina lives in this farmhouse with your son and your skeleton. She calls it your home but your mind is an itinerant, holding addresses in Boston and Seattle and the ivory sands of Santa Barbara.
You could be happy here. You should be happy here, away from the bigots back in Jackson and the bandits and clickers but you stand by the door, rattling the catch.
Grief has robbed you of his voice, of the colour of his eyes, of an expression you’ll search for in the face of every dead thing you’ll encounter from here on out. On Dina’s, you find worry. She pulls you into her shoulder by the back of your neck as if she expects sobs to erupt from the cavern inside your chest. Flourishing there is a venom that will make a monster of you yet. For now, it has you don your holster and your boots, the same as every night since Tommy showed up.
Dina kisses your face and guides you back to your room. She leaves the light on but drowses off quickly as new mothers do, leaving you to your dead. His brain paints the walls. Your brain takes you away: hotels and museums and synagogues and record shops and arcades and malls awash with light.
A thud, a squelch, a thud, a squelch, a thud, a squelch. You’re back in military school. The bottom bunk is narrow so the two of you lay forehead to forehead, a Walkman between you. You crack a dad joke and she laughs so hard that the bed shakes. She laughs hard because his fingernails rake against the floor. Tommy once told you how they call them cadaveric spasms, like the science of it would help you make peace with the corpse on your floor.
You cling to Dina and clap your eyes shut. Dina knows loss as intimately as you but it didn’t harden her. It made her into your harbour. She followed you into the open mouth of hell not once but twice. Three strikes and you’re out. You start to think that it might be worth it.
It’s all so ironic. You took a bite from a runner and walked away. You grappled with cannibals and Fireflies and fascists armed to the fucking teeth. And you’re alive, in spite of it all, although you don’t really want to be, although you don’t feel it. You think about the parasites wearing the bodies of the people you loved, about how they died and got back up again.
Dina presses for two weeks and you give them to her. Two weeks come and go and you do your best to forget. Forgetting is easiest at sunup. When the pink wide belts of first light unpick the seams of sleep, night is finally over. JJ is a happy baby. He is all sunshine for you. You change his diaper and bring him to your bed. You kiss his mother good morning. You tuck her hair behind her ear and she smiles at you. Her eyes are like honey and as she looks up at you from behind her eyelashes, you think she’s the most beautiful person whose life you ever ruined. She nurses the baby. She blows raspberries on his belly. You savour these moments. You savour them because you’re going to leave. You savour them because this will make it harder and it feels like penance.
An hour later, you sit in the kitchen. Dina brushes her teeth in the sink. She washes her face, then JJ’s. She uses a cute little cloth to clean his fingers and toes. She hands him to you, then takes the towel off the mirror and stands before it with an elastic in her mouth. There’s a crack down the middle and you can’t bear to look at it, at the fragments that make up your skull.
Dina cracks eggs and you try not to flinch. She talks enough for the two of you. She calls you pet names you loved a lifetime ago. Then you spend twenty minutes poking at the scrambled egg that she cooked just so because it doesn’t whet your appetite. You bounce JJ on your knee. JJ because four syllables are too much of a mouthful. JJ because the way your son’s name takes form in Dina’s mouth splits you apart. When Dina announced him to his grandparents, you found yourself on the floor of a different room two days later, the baby in her arms, and your fingernails raking pink lines on her knee.
You tell her you’re fine, that you’re not very hungry and you push it down, like your escape instinct, like the lodge. You put the lambs and their mothers out to pasture. You feed the chickens and toss the water from the kettle in the flower boxes. You cut down the doe that is caught in your snare. Something helped itself to her eyeballs and you envy the impersonalness of it all. She will go unmourned and unavenged. The rabbits down in the glen will continue to graze and the world will go on spinning.
You fix a pot of coffee even though you still haven’t acquired a taste for it. The two of you sit out on the porch, holding hands and watching the birds flutter and erupt as they make their morning round across the sky. They’re like clickers. All headed in the same direction. Later, you’ll find one is caught in the fence. Tall blonde woman, no face. You’ll drive a knife into its head again and again and again.
Dina will fix a dinner that you will not eat. You will lock up the sheep and feed the chickens egg whites and ketchup from a plastic bag. You will wash the dishes with cold water, slip on The Crooked Still and shake your hips and kiss her convincingly. Then you’ll lay next to her and the baby until they both fall asleep, the moonlight spilling across the ceiling, the colour of bone. You’ll head to the study and spend hours mixing paints, never accomplishing the right shade of green. You’ll condemn a sketch to the waste bin, then another. Then you’ll head back to bed and find Dina’s hand on JJ’s tummy. His eyelids will flutter. He will ball his fists. You will wonder what he dreams about.
You will tend the chickens. You will tend the sheep. You will tend the baby. You will eat breakfast, lunch and dinner. A clicker will make its way over to the perimeter. You will kill it. A fox will get to the chickens. You will lamb the sheep in December. Dina will fix simple meals of chicken, rabbit, lamb, eggs, milk and bread.
This is how it will be for however long you can keep this up. A month or two, you think. If you come to your senses, you’ll grow old like this. As old as anybody gets nowadays.
Dina sits on the porch of the farmhouse with your son and your skeleton. She squeezes your hand. You will dip apples in honey to toast the new year, she thinks. You will teach JJ how to draw, how to shoot, how to ride, how to drive, how to play guitar and piano. You will tell him about his heritage. He will learn to love your corny music and your dusty old comic books. You will tell him about his dad and his aunt Talia and his grandma. She’s undecided about the uncles.
You smile at her but your things are in boxes. When you head back inside, you’ll peel off his jacket and leave it off the hook. You won’t settle. You won’t assign meaning to the walls and the rafters.
The past isn’t your friend, but you’re becoming acquainted with the future. Your future isn’t here, it’s in the seat of the California coast, your hands around the wolf’s throat, your thumbs against her windpipe and your towering rage granting you a strength you’ve since lost.